


the image you've each created of the other

by demeritus



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Beholding Avatar Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Canon-Typical The Beholding Content (The Magnus Archives), Canon-Typical The Lonely Content (The Magnus Archives), During Canon, Hopeful Ending, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, M/M, The Lonely Fear Domain (The Magnus Archives), also to cope with 194, i don't think i'll be rewriting the Change tho so, with a taste of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-12
Updated: 2021-02-12
Packaged: 2021-03-12 00:41:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29376540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/demeritus/pseuds/demeritus
Summary: “This is where I should be. It feels right…”“Martin, don’t say that...this isn’t right, this isn’t you!”“It is though...I really loved you, you know?”(spoilers up to 159)
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Kudos: 19





	the image you've each created of the other

**Author's Note:**

> CW: self-hate, suicidal ideation, identity issues, emotional manipulation, gaslighting, dissociation, derealization, depersonalization, and being Very Angsty about Being a Monster
> 
> (please let me know if I should add anything to this list <3 )

Jon watched Martin dissipate into the emptiness that surrounded him, and anyway, he was only an echo, wasn’t he. Martin didn’t want to see him. 

And why should he?

_“Perhaps it would be better if you stayed here awhile...you can’t hurt anyone here.”_

Perhaps it would. All he did was hurt people. All his life - a tireless annoyance to his grandmother (his constant childhood jaunts weren’t meant only for his own benefit), an insufferable student (even amongst English majors), a terrible boyfriend (Georgie had always deserved someone better), a useful researcher but the worst kind of pompous colleague (work was never about making friends, after all), an archivist who had no idea how to archive -

And all of that was before everything went wrong. 

After? There was nothing left. No friends, no allies...he was himself a dead thing, the shattered remnants of a man foolish and arrogant enough to think that he had any control over his own life; a faded, broken identity patched together to be the vessel for something else, something terrible, but ultimately, something more useful than he’d ever been.

He _liked_ it, that much he had told Gerry. This power wasn’t consuming him, he was accepting it. It was just as Elia- just as _Jonah_ said so long ago.

_“You never **wanted** this, no, but I'm afraid you absolutely did **choose** it.”_

He could lie to himself, tell himself that he was the victim, that he was possessed or being controlled, but he knew it wasn’t the truth, of course. That was all he was anymore, a Thing That Knows. He should have noticed sooner, but his gaze was always turned outward.

Seeing Martin like that, his eyes empty and downcast, hearing the certainty in his voice, the resignation...If he couldn’t save Martin, if he couldn’t save himself, then the least he could do was try to save everyone else from the monster he had become, maybe even from Jonah Magnus.

Whatever Jonah wanted from him, whatever scheme had driven him to devote centuries of work and years of manipulation into transforming someone into a literal tool of fear...If Jon stayed here, in the Lonely, on the shore with no beach and the sea with no end, Jonah would lose. Jon had already lost, and with the last thread of humanity that sat within him, he would do what they had always wanted him to - sit down, shut up, and accept his fate. If he couldn’t control anything else, at least he could make this choice. His own suffering, compared to the hundreds of innocent people he had ignorantly, and sometimes knowingly, cursed with lifetimes of nightmares? The decision was obvious. He hoped that they might be spared if he stayed here, absent enough from their world that their nightmares might fade, the monstrous image of himself watching them suffer night after night - even removing it wouldn’t erase the trauma, but it was something.

He watched his life pass by - he Knew every word he should have changed, every insult he should have held back, every action that meant the difference between now and what could have been. He watched it all and knew he could have been better, and at the same time, he Knew that it never could have gone any other way. Was that right? Was one of those an interpretation and the other a bit of truth ripped from the ether, just as he had ripped the truth from Kurt Anderson, Floyd Matharu, that poor woman from the coffee shop…

No, he couldn’t tell anymore, which thoughts were his and which were - Better if he pushed them all away. Better to ignore it until it disappears. 

If only it was that easy. He deserved this suffering. Lifetimes of suffering would do nothing to atone for his crimes.

Even so, if he had tried hard enough, made better choices, put others first despite his selfish obsession with proving his worth -

If things had been different. If Sasha had been- No, he couldn’t trust anything he remembered about Sasha. It was all wrong. If he had been replaced instead, his existence erased and rewritten into some stale, unobtrusive narrative...Things might have ended the same way, but he was sure that whoever - whoever Sasha really was, she would have done a far better job against Jonah. She would have done as Gertrude did - worked against the Eye, worked against _all_ the Dread Powers until her last breath. She never would have let herself become -

The icy water nearly reached Jon’s shoulders. He shivered weakly and dug his hands into the heavy sand below. When had he started kneeling? 

Gradually, painfully, he stood up, the weight of his soaked clothes drawing him back down as much as his aching muscles He dragged himself to shore before collapsing. The water still encompassed part of his body as he lay there curled into himself and watching the waves roll in and out.

How long had he been sitting there? He remembered talking to Peter Lukas, he remembered - he remembered what happened after, then nothing but open air. It felt so distant. The ache of hunger that had been ever present in his recent memory - it was gone. He tried to notice himself, his arms and legs, he tried to feel his hair, his face, but there was nothing there. All he felt was more damp, more cold, and that idea - that perhaps he really had disappeared, perhaps he too was a ghost, an echo like Martin and everyone else in this room full of no one, that idea gave him more relief than he’d felt in years. 

He could no longer picture what he looked like The life he had so carefully cataloged moments ago, or had it been hours ago? That life belonged to someone else. He knew who he was. He was here, and here was not a life.

That didn’t stop the lives of others from crashing through his mind like gusts of wind send water into rapids. 

He saw a man - short, serious, impatient despite his solitude, sitting at a flimsy wooden desk in a dim room. He saw this man’s story, but it wasn’t important.

He saw a woman - she was ancient, she had lived more lives than anyone could imagine and yet she was still human. Mostly, anyway. She was cold, but that coldness was what she needed. He saw the end of her life, and he knew that she knew she had not lived in vain.

He saw another person - no, not a person. His body was human and his eyes had once been, but what lived inside hadn’t been human for a long time. Jon didn’t see this man for long - those eyes, they stared at him even though he was no one, and they Knew the nothingness inside him.

It cut away to someone else, someone who was definitely a person. This time, he could almost make out the face of the man he was Seeing, but if he focused for too long, it was gone. The man was sitting at a table, stirring a spoon around and around in a mug full of something hot which was slowly turning cold. The man was watching someone as well, but The Archivist couldn’t see who...Why couldn’t he see who? Nothing should be hidden from his vision, yet it was as if this man with red hair and a fluttering heartbeat and a history of sitting and waiting and keeping quiet and accepting his fate - it was like he was looking straight at him. Not like those other eyes, grey and lifeless, a piercing gaze that cut like autopsy knives. Those eyes, bright blue but fading like wisps of thin clouds across the sky, somehow these eyes were for him.

The Archivist tried to See what this meant, if he had Known this man before, and the closer he got to an answer, the clearer the shore and the water around him became. 

He Knew this man, but why? From where? He had never been anywhere but here and no one else had ever been here - that distance was his only constant and the idea that that might be compromised - 

Jon’s hands were freezing, and they ached more and more as he rubbed them together, though he didn’t know why he was doing that - it felt out of place, wrong, to be anything but numb, anything but cold. And he could still see that face.

Who was that, and why was he so much clearer, so much closer, than the others he had spent so long Watching? People have names, he vaguely remembered, what was his name? 

That cold ache spread from his hands to his arms, then his torso and his legs, and when he could feel his feet he stood up with an agonized cry of pain that startled him. Was that his voice? It had to belong to someone else.

He squinted into the fog before him - everything was so pale, but somehow so bright, he couldn’t look directly at it. How irritating.

That face was still in his mind, and now that he had hands and this man seemed so close, for a moment he almost felt like he could reach forward and touch that face. Now that he had a voice, he felt like he could call out.

He stumbled forward, towards the face that now seemed to be steps away from him, impossibly present. Moments later, he was inches away. It wasn’t clear - the face was obscured like everything else, the water, the sand, and it was wrong somehow. Before, it- _the man’s face_ , it had been warm, slightly red, his lips turned upward in what must have been a smile. Not here, not now. He had to Know why it had changed.

“Who are you?” He croaked, his voice so much weaker, so much quieter than he had expected.

The red-haired man just shrugged. 

_“No one. Go away.”_

That wasn’t the right answer. Everyone else was Someone and no one could refuse The Archivist’s questions.

_**“Who are you?”** _

_“I said go **away!** ”_

The Archivi- Jon- he was past thinking, past watching and waiting and asking politely.

_**“Who am I then? Who do you want to leave?”** _

The red-haired man stopped turning away at that. His eyes were still downcast, but they glanced back.

“W-what?”

_**“Who am I? Who are you sending away?”** _

Martin blinked, shut his eyes tight for a moment before looking directly at Jon. The fog encompassed them both like a blanket, and Jon - oh God, Jon-

_**“Who am I? Please! Tell me who i am!”** _

Jon collapsed in front of Martin, his painfully thin, pale frame driven further into the fog and now so far down that Martin had to kneel and fold his legs underneath him just to see- Jon’s eyes seemed glued shut, and tears streamed from them. His voice, THe Archivist’s prying questions resonated and pulled at Martin’s throat, but behind it, Jon’s own throat sounded dry, torn up, raw. Desperate.

_**“Just tell me! It’s the one thing I don’t Know! Do I have a name? I** have to know…I have…”_

Martin took one of Jon’s hands in his. They were both freezing, but it felt like the right thing to do. He looked down at Jon and touched his face, hoping to ease his eyes open.

“I’m here, okay?” Martin said, still dazed, but the right words left from his lips.. “Jon, I’m here. Please - I won’t leave you - I won’t if it means that you-”

Tears started from Martin’s eyes, and his exhaustion finally caused him to collapse right next to Jon. 

“Jon - you have a name, okay? You’re not alone anymore, I’m right here. Please Jon…”

The Archivist opened his eyes, and Jon looked at Martin.

 _ **“I know** …I know_ you’re here. And - I-I’m _Jon_ , then-?” He was even more dazed than Martin.

“Okay. Okay, good. You, you know who you are, now tell me, tell me who I am.”

“Oh, Martin,” Jon took one of Martin’s hands in his, relieved to See- no, “I see you now. I see you right there, Martin, and that’s- You’re all I see and all I need to see.”

Martin simply nodded and took Jon into his arms. They stayed there, clinging to each other, willing themselves together despite the nothing around them, until the nothing was gone and they lay on a cold stone floor, and at least this cold was natural.

They kept their eyes locked on each other when they did open them - the chamber was empty but for them and the aging corpse of an evil man, ever watching from its seat in the panopticon. 

That didn’t matter right then.

For the first time, Jon and Martin had nothing more important to do than sit with each other. For all their doubts and fears, the nagging certainty that this might be the only time they could have together, like this, they stayed right where they were. For a moment, the only thing Jon could feel watching him was Martin, and in return, Martin had never felt so wonderfully seen.


End file.
